identity politics

Thursday, 19 February 2015

Rudy Giuliani, who isn't aging well, responding to criticism following his claim that the Potus doesn't love America:

Some people thought it was racist — I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people(...) This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.

I hate it when people's stupidity forces me to defend Obama, but since when is socialism and anti-colonialism aren't American? I have said it since Barack Obama was crowned as the One, who was going to change America : he is as American as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and that is in part of his problem. His non-whiteness masks his sameness!

Thursday, 22 January 2015

Ah enfinShlomo Sand speaks on the attacks in Paris and as almost always adds much needed perspective to the debate:

Some of the caricatures I saw in Charlie Hebdo – long before the shooting – seemed to me to be in bad taste; only a minority made me laugh. But that’s not the problem. In the majority of the magazine’s cartoons about Islam that came to my attention over the last decade, what I saw was manipulative hatred, mainly designed to appeal to its (obviously, non-Muslim) readers. I thought Charlie’s reproduction of the cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was deplorable. In 2006 – yes, already back then – I thought that the drawing of Mohammed wearing a bomb as a turban was a pure provocation. It wasn’t so much a caricature attacking Islamists, as a stupid reduction of Islam to terrorism; it’s a bit like identifying Judaism with money!

Some say that Charlie took on all religions indiscriminately, but what does that really mean? Certainly it did mock Christians and sometimes Jews. All the same, neither the Danish paper nor Charlie would go so far – fortunately enough – to publish a caricature presenting the prophet Moses as a crafty usurer loitering on a street corner in a kippah and tassels. It’s a good thing, indeed, that in what people today call ‘Judaeo-Christian’ civilisation it’s no longer possible to spread anti-Jewish hatred in public, like it was in the distant past. I am for freedom of expression, but at the same time I’m against racist incitement. I’ll admit that I’m happy to go along with the ban on Dieudonné publicly expressing his ‘critique’ and his ‘banter’ about Jews. However, I am absolutely opposed to him being physically assaulted, and if by chance some idiot did attack him, I would be very shocked… but then again, I wouldn’t go as far as waving a placard around bearing the words ‘Je suis Dieudonné’.

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

This mistake in James D. le Sueur article's on the terrorist attacks,in Paris at the Walrus irks me because it isn't innocent:

French Muslim comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala—who already had established himself as a controversial figure—now faces up to seven years in prison for using Facebook to declare his apparent solidarity with the Kosher-market murderer (“Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly”). The arrest seemed hypocritical for a nation seeking to reaffirm its protection of speech—even highly irreverent speech.

Dieudonné isn't Muslin and is as French as Sarkozy. Thus, I wonder why his frenchness is always questioned when both his brand of 'humor' and his antisemitism are very French!

Saturday, 17 January 2015

Our biggest advantage is that our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans (...)There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case. And that’s probably the greatest danger that Europe faces…It’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems.

Ah I can't believe that some still believe that Obama gets the world because he claimed to be a citizen of the world!

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

American campus feminists and the majority of people who write for mainstream websites are among the most privileged, the most protected, the freest people on the planet. It is unbecoming, and unproductive, to continue to cling to a sense of invincible unfreedom.

Feminism is not fragile. To borrow from Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, memorably portrayed by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men (1992), feminism can handle the truth, told straight. Sisterhood is powerful. Instead of devouring their own, feminists should use that power against the real enemies.

Thursday, 20 November 2014

When Susan B. Anthony died in 1906, so many obituaries mistakenly claimed that she had been present at the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention that the women’s columns of various newspapers later issued corrections. The Myth of Seneca Falls explains why such a widespread error was almost inevitable. Lisa Tetrault’s central argument is that the 1848 convention at Seneca Falls that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott helped to organize became “nineteenth century feminism’s watershed event” through Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s retroactive decision to make it that. Their success meant that later generations of suffragists would not only come to honor Seneca Falls as the singular birthplace of woman suffrage but would assume Anthony had been there, although she and Stanton did not meet until 1851. This outcome makes clear that history differs from memory, a claim that underpins Tetrault’s investigation of the provenance of the conventional 1848-to-1920, first-wave chronology.

Friday, 03 October 2014

Thought-provoking and delicious stuff from Corey Robin on the Arendt/Eichmann wars :

In the beginning, when the battle first broke out after the publication of Eichmann, the main issue of contention was Arendt’s treatment of the Jewish Councils. But now that most of that generation of survivors is gone, that issue has died down.

Now the main fault line of the battle is Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann’s anti-Semitism: whether she minimized it or not. And that issue, it seems to me, is very much tied up with the fate of Israel.

After all, if the claim could be made, however vulgarly (for this was not in fact Arendt’s point at all), that Ground Zero of modern anti-Semitism was not in fact anti-Semitic, what does that tell us about the presence and persistence of anti-Semitism in the contemporary world? Again, that was not in fact Arendt’s argument, but it’s been taken that way, and I can’t help but think that one of the reasons why the focus on Eichmann’s anti-Semitism plays the role now that it does (as opposed to when the book was originally published) has something to do with the legitimation crisis that Israel is currently undergoing.

Monday, 18 August 2014

It would be too simplistic and superficial to assert that what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri, the Show-Me state of America, proves that the era of Postracialness either never started or is over. The safest conclusion that can drawn from the unrest in that small town of Middle America is that Obama's America is reeling from its orrnamemtalism, to use a term coined by David Cannadine, and from the illusions of identity, which it is contributing to equal to destiny.

The death of Michael Brown, the following protests, the outrage and the poignant calls for justice that are more about history and its hold on the American experience, the clashes, the backlash, the curfew, the police's reaction and at last its attempt to put a black face on its incompetence by its use of Captain Ronald Johnson as its spokesman and to justify an unfortunate death by criminalization of the youth shot are symptoms of American racialism, its addiction to glitz, fritz and bad ideas, and its puppy love for impotent symbols designed to solve its essentialist and equality issues.

None of these events is new. The narratives are familiar. The story or rather stories have already been written. They will lead to the same comfortable and same dead end for the beliefs are sacralized. Discourse will be sterile between the America of Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is going to point to the gunshot wounds of the dead and history to preach in the wilderness for reparations and for change that they are still waiting for, and the one of Shelby Steele, which is going to point to the present, the tape of Michael Brown allegedly shoving a store clerk and insist on personal responsibility.

The real dialogue on race, which Eric Holder called for at the beginning of his attorney generalship, is impossible for two reasons. The first is all sides want to be listened to as they lecture the other on what it has meant or not meant to be black in America. The second reason is more troublesome and complex: Race in America is no longer about race but about identity and Americans' refusal to acknowledge that its passion for absolute freedom and power make absolute justice impossible while making the quest of equality of the working poor or struggling middle class, a lot of which are assumed to be born bad, problematic.

Thus, America has been, in a sense, postracial since its founding by a few white males. Ferguson, Missouri is just a remainder that blackness is an exotic illusion and a dangerous essentialist and flawed notion which cannot soften America's iron fist. Michael Brown died in Obama's America which loves to get riled up with beautiful and moving speeches but always comes up short when the call for action isn't to do something symbolic as electing a multiracial president. Obama's America is a country which is an addict. It is heavily dependent on the bling whether it is political, social and material and its crack cocaine is hope because it makes it believe that it can be saved by one man and the absolutely appalling and cheap notion that we are the ones that we have been waiting for as if change were a lottery or about finding Jesus.

Whether America and Americana want to admit it or not, they are the one making history now and to use a quote from René Char which Hannah Arendt loved to use, notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament (our inheritance was left to us by no testament). Obama's presidency has provided at least one wonder for America and the world: it has shown that people with black DNA and non-whites are not just impotent tools of history or sacrificial lambs to be used to fix the rotten and prevent the festering and the explosion of long deferred dreams. Obama has shown that a person and a country aren't what they say they are or what history and experience say they ought to be but what they do.

It was, thus, always naive and suicidal to believe that a president and a country with a problematic use of power could understand and do what it takes to make sure that the shooting of an unarmed youth whether it is a crime or an unfortunate accident not become just another deal in. America's long and perilous cycle with its history of violence and essentialism and its unwillingness to change paralyzed by the fear that it would kill its exceptionalism.

In short, there is in all Americans including me a Dinesh D’Souza and he is more difficult to fight than the smartest and fiercest of demons.

Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Awesome stuff from Ed Pavlić on his must read article on James Baldwin at 90:

The questions which connect Baldwin’s meetings with Kennedy and with the people on the streets of San Francisco are still unasked. The American idiom to ask and answer them in still eludes us. Today, huge numbers of people assume they can avoid—are clueless as to how connect to—such questions. Post-Racialists. Others, trapped inside the questions, can’t afford to suspect they don’t know the answers. Racial essentialists. The result is widespread dues unpaid as much American experience occurs in denied territory, being uncharted within and un-communicated between people. Panic stricken vacuums abound. What changes, what constants and what illusions made the United States the place that elects a black President? What does black President actually mean? And, for whom does what change, exactly? And, what then? No one engaged these questions and sought terms that would force still deeper ones more intensely than James Baldwin. If we’re serious about what Baldwin’s work can mean in the contemporary world—and evidence mounts indicating that we aren’t[ix]—the place to begin is with a brief look at the structure of the constant changes and changing constants in the musically inflected dimensions of Baldwin’s thought. After that, we’ll examine a few moments in the contemporary culture: a viral Youtube film of street dancers in East Oakland and President Obama’s joking comments about his Predator Drone campaign in the war on terror.

Isn't reassuring to realize that blackness, whatever it may mean, doesn't diminish/sublimate/transform/ affect/eradicate Americanness, however one defines it ?

Monday, 12 May 2014

I am often told that the average Muslim wholeheartedly rejects the use of violence and terror, does not share the radicals' belief that a degenerate and corrupt Western culture needs to be replaced with an Islamic one, and abhors the denigration of women's most basic rights. Well, it is time for those peace-loving Muslims to do more, much more, to resist those in their midst who engage in this type of proselytizing before they proceed to the phase of holy war.

It is also time for Western liberals to wake up. If they choose to regard Boko Haram as an aberration, they do so at their peril. The kidnapping of these schoolgirls is not an isolated tragedy; their fate reflects a new wave of jihadism that extends far beyond Nigeria and poses a mortal threat to the rights of women and girls. If my pointing this out offends some people more than the odious acts of Boko Haram, then so be it.

I find Ali's predictability scary for it shows that she has stopped growing and thinking. Oh well, she is adapting very well to the AmericanWesternmodern contemporary intellectual terrain.

Tuesday, 29 April 2014

Oh my gawd, words from John Hinderaker that make one wonder whether he is capable of thinking:

The political motive to make Donald Sterling the poster boy for 21st century racism is obvious, but is he actually a racist? I have never met the man, but it doesn’t seem probable. He owns a basketball team on which 12 of the 14 players are black. The coach is black. Sterling has black friends, like Earvin Johnson; it was an Instagram photo of Stiviano with Johnson that precipitated the fatal argument. Johnson reacted angrily, vowing never to attend another Clippers game. Yet Sterling has long considered Johnson a friend; on the tape, he tells Stiviano that Johnson is worthy of respect.

(...) So an 80-year-old man with a much younger, mixed-race girlfriend is sexually insecure–go figure! He has a friend, a negative-image Iago, who plays on his insecurity and teases him when the mistress posts pictures with black men, however innocent they may be. So the old man asks her not to do it. She can spend all day with black men and even sleep with them, he says, just don’t post photos or attend Clippers games with them. But the young woman already has one foot out the door, and she illegally records her conversation with the old man, and then turns it over to two of the most disreputable gossip sites on the internet.

This sad domestic drama has become the best evidence the Left can come up with of the ongoing legacy of slavery and discrimination. It merits denunciation by the President of the United States, who locates the old man’s sad story in the grand sweep of history.

On the tape, Donald Sterling says, “I love the black people.” I can’t vouch for his sincerity, but there is nothing in the DMZ/Deadspin tapes that belies that sentiment. It is telling that this domestic upheaval between an aging billionaire and his gold-digging, disloyal mistress represents the best the Left can come up with to support its claim that racism and the “legacy of race and slavery and segregation” are alive and well.

America, you have a problem and it isn't about race ! That would be less frightening.

Tuesday, 22 April 2014

ACCORDING to one American stereotype, Europe is somewhere on the road between lazy godlessness and mass conversion to Islam. Does it have any kernel of truth? This much is true: in most European countries there is no obvious equivalent of the American religious right in which a large standing constituency spoils for a fight over hard ethical issues. Those kinds of issues arise in Europe of course, but it is hard for European politicians to build a career by claiming the traditionalist ground; they would generally lose more votes than they would gain.

What does exist in Europe is the politics of identity, including religious identity. In this area Europe's parties and politicians always think carefully about the signals they send and getting it right or wrong has consequences.

(...)The trick in European politics is to appeal to some religious and cultural constituencies without alienating others.

Wednesday, 02 April 2014

People who take a strict binary view of culture ("culture of privilege = awesome; culture of poverty = fail") are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. They extoll "middle-class values" to the ignorance and exclusion of all others. To understand, you must imagine what it means to confront algebra in the morning and "Shorty, can I see your bike?" in the afternoon. It's very nice to talk about "middle-class values" when that describes your small, limited world. But when your grandmother lives in one hood and your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than "middle-class values." You need to be bilingual.

David Brooks polluted the American 'culture' debate with mediocre thinking and thus, it is just desperately obnoxious and wasteful!

Friday, 07 March 2014

To some extent, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin. (...)What’s more, if placing the blame for the problems of a whole nation on a particular minority is increasingly considered “acceptable,” “mainstream,” and “not a threat to democracy,” then all minorities have reason to be concerned — because this paves the way for all kinds of scapegoating.

What should really worry us as Jews, then, is not just that some French people are scapegoating Muslims for the current economic crisis, but that most French people, or at least half of them, don’t seem to think that’s such a big deal.

Friday, 31 January 2014

"I am not raising 'nothing niggers,'" my mother used to tell me. "I am not raising niggers to stand on the corner." My mother did not know her father. In my life, I've loved four women. One of them did not know her father and the other two, very often, wished they didn't. It's not very hard to look at that, and seethe. It's not very hard to look at that and see a surrender, while you are out here at war, and seethe. It not hard to look around at your community and feel that you are afflicted by quitters, that your family--in particular--is afflicted by a weakness. And so great is this weakness that the experience of black fatherlessness can connect Barack Obama in Hawaii to young black boys on the South Side, and that fact--whatever the charts, graphs and histories may show--is bracing. When Barack Obama steps into a room and attacks people for presumably using poverty or bigotry as an excuse to not parent, he is channeling a feeling deep in the heart of all black people, a frustration, a rage at ourselves for letting this happened, for allowing our community to descend into the basement of America, and dwell there seemingly forever. (...) There are moments when I hear the president speak and I am awed. No one, from the offices of the White House, could have better explained to America what the George Zimmerman verdict meant. And I think history will remember that, and remember him for it. But I think history will also remember his unquestioning embrace of "twice as good" in a country that has always given, even under his watch, black people half as much.

Friday, 17 January 2014

Well, best wishes to all for the new year (ah it's a world cup year yeah!) and here's a sugary excerpt from Fredrick C. Harris:

What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to “uplift the race” by correcting the “bad” traits of the black poor has now evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama, a governing philosophy that centers on managing the behavior of black people left behind in a society touted as being full of opportunity. In an era marked by rising inequality and declining economic mobility for most Americans—but particularly for black Americans—the twenty-first-century version of the politics of respectability works to accommodate neoliberalism. The virtues of self-care and self-correction are framed as strategies to lift the black poor out of their condition by preparing them for the market economy.

For more than half of the twentieth century, the concept of the “Talented Tenth” commanded black elites to “lift as we climb,” or to prove to white America that blacks were worthy of full citizenship rights by getting the untalented nine-tenths to rid themselves of bad customs and habits. Today’s politics of respectability, however, commands blacks left behind in post–civil rights America to “lift up thyself.” Moreover, the ideology of respectability, like most other strategies for black progress articulated within the spaces where blacks discussed the best courses of action for black freedom, once lurked for the most part beneath the gaze of white America. But now that black elites are part of the mainstream elite in media, entertainment, politics, and the academy, respectability talk operates within the official sphere, shaping the opinions, debates, and policy perspectives on what should—and should not—be done on the behalf of the black poor.

Monday, 09 December 2013

The sugary excerpt of the day from Alain Finkielkraut who is almost as blind as he is rotten by his self-righteousness:

I am pained to see that the French mode of European civilization is threatened. France is in the process of transforming into a post-national and multicultural society. It seems to me that this enormous transformation does not bring anything good. I am pained to see that the French mode of European civilization is threatened. France is in the process of transforming into a post-national and multicultural society. It seems to me that this enormous transformation does not bring anything good. (...)Today the Muslims in France like to shout in an act of self-assertion: We are just as French as you! It would have never occurred to my parents to say something like that. I would also never say that I am just as French as Charles de Gaulle was.

Wednesday, 05 June 2013

Discussing the traditional role of corporeality in protest, Judith Butler
recently noted that: “if there is a body in the public sphere, it is masculine,
free to create, but not itself created... When male citizens enter into the
public square to debate questions of justice, revenge, war, and emancipation,
they take the illuminated public square for granted as the architecturally
bounded theatre of their speech.” By contrast, the female body has customarily
been associated with the sexual, the childish, the labouring and the
pre-political. This being the case, Butler argues for the need to interrogate
and challenge the division of gendered bodies into “one that appears publicly
to speak and act, and another, feminine, foreign and mute, that is generally
relegated to the private and pre-political sphere.” (...)
Boobs can be fun. Boobs can be frivolous, primal or sexy. For this reason, they
are compelling. In the right context, they might prove powerful. But they are
also distracting. And for those women wishing to enter the theatre of political
speech to debate questions of justice, emancipation, war, or indeed the sales tax on
tampons, to achieve something more than lechery and to be taken seriously, they
may prove a diversion.

Saturday, 25 May 2013

The fact that a terrorist is likely to
be a Muslim does not mean a Muslim is likely to be a terrorist. Even if
we assume that there are ten terrorists walking the streets for every
one inside, then 99.988% of Muslims are not terrorists. To put this
another way, there's only around a one in 8000 chance of a Muslim being a
terrorist; it's 16 times more likely that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will name their child Wayne.
Given all this, why does anyone think terrorism is a Muslim problem?

Wednesday, 13 March 2013

﻿For western journalism to be taken seriously by Africans and
Westerners alike, it needs Africans to vouch for stories rather than
satirizing them. I am not saying that journalism needs the subject to
agree with the content, but the search for journalistic truth takes
place within a broad societal consensus. That is, while one may disagree
with particular reportage and the facts, the spirit of the essay should
not be in question. But Africans are saying that the journalists are
not representing the complex truth of the continent; that Western
journalists are not only misrepresenting the truth, but are in spirit
working against the continent. The good news is there have been enough
people questioning the coverage of Africa over the years that Western
journalists have had no choice but to do some soul searching. The bad
news is that the answers are variations of the problem.

Michela Wrong, in a New York Timespiece
shortly before the Kenyan elections, debated the use of the word
“tribe.” She acknowledged that the word tribe “carries too many colonial
echoes. It conjures up M.G.M. visions of masked dances and pagan rites.
‘Tribal violence’ and ‘tribal voting’ suggest something illogical and
instinctive, motivated by impulses Westerners distanced themselves from
long ago.” But she concluded the piece by reserving her right to use the
term. She stated that “When it comes to the T-word, Kenyan politics are
neither atavistic nor illogical. But yes, they are tribal.” The term
tribe should have died in the 2007 elections when Africanist scholars
took NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman’s usage of the term to task. To his credit, Gettleman stopped using the term.

If you have Wrong insisting on using a discredited analytical
framework, you have others who position themselves as missionaries and
explorers out to save the image of Africa. But their egos end up
outsizing the story.

Well, the problem starts with the simple fact that Africa is not a country and that therefore Kenya is neither Mali or Cote d'Ivoire and vice versa.

Monday, 04 March 2013

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great
disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out
ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency
was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at
Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African
slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries
to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their
populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and
hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his
much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a
new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence
and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president,
himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush
administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to
Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech.

Oh Well as the one himself once said words matter and the trouble here starts with the fact that having an 'african' policy doesn't mean much for there is no africa. Moreover, the saddest fact is that reality when it comes to Obama's deeds in countries on the african continent doesn't matter because of the worst and most dangerous anti-intellectual form of identity politics.

I bet that at least some Nigeriens are happy to have a drone base in Niamey.

Thursday, 07 February 2013

According to Gawker, [Michael] Bloomberg once told a female colleague to “kill
it” when she announced her pregnancy, only after teasing her about being
too ugly to be engaged. Another Bloomberg employee complained of the
institutional harassment at Bloomberg LP in the late 1990s, and believed
that the misogynistic workplace culture was linked to her being raped
by her superior in a hotel room. Also, “in 2007 the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against Bloomberg LP on behalf of
78 women who claimed that Bloomberg — who at that point was not
involved in the day-to-day company operations, despite being a majority
shareholder — and Bloomberg LP ‘fostered, condoned and perpetuated’ a
hostile work environment for female employees.”

This is pretty bad, right? Nevertheless, nobody seemed
to really care when they elected him to mayor the first, second or third
time. And nobody seems to really care now either.

Imagine if there was a similar history of his saying or
condoning disparaging remarks against blacks or Jews. Our inboxes and
Facebook feeds would be filled with celebrity-endorsed pleas to sign
online petitions pressuring him to resign from office. He would feel
obligated to at least mutter some public apology, even if it clearly
wasn’t heartfelt. But talk down to women like this, and the outrage is
barely existent. (Think I am over exaggerating? Remember what happened
with serial misogynist Charlie Sheen? The actor’s career was derailed
by a single anti-semitic comment, after years of reports of domestic
abuse and porn addiction.)

Sure, sexism can be more difficult to define than
racism or anti-semitism (because humans + sex drives = messy), but when
there is a pattern of misogynistic behavior like Bloomberg’s, albeit
alleged, I wonder why we are so darn tolerant.

Well, the answer to that question explains in part why Obama is president.

Friday, 01 February 2013

What I want to do now, though, is simply to vent about the patent
irresponsibility of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in appointing
his friend Michael Cowan to replace John Kerry as senator, apparently
for no other reason than his (Gov. Patrick's) desire to have an
African-American Democratic senator for at least four monts or so, and
regardless of the fact that there is no reason at all to believe that
Sen. Cowan, as I presume he'll become tomorrow or very shortly
thereafter, has any real knowledge about national political issues that
may in fact come up in the next four months. This is "expressive
politics" at its absolute worst, and Gov. Patrick should be ashamed of
himself. Frankly, it is the kind of self-indulgent gesture by someone
with power that gives "affirmative action" (which I support) a bad name
with many Americans. He has, in one instant, disserved his state, his
party, and the nation (even if, as I presume, Sen. Cowan is an extremely
fine and able person whom all of us would be proud to have as a friend
or, if governor of Massachusetts, an aide, as he was.)
Nothing in my remarks should be read as casting aspersions on Mr.
Cowan's personal character (other, frankly, than that he didn't have the
personal self-discipline to exercise what Madison might have described
as the "civic virtue" to tell the Governor that he is highly flattered
but not really qualified for the job).

All politics nowadays is expressive politics, which is almost always a potent and dangerous form of identity politics.

Deval Patrick is Obama 1.0, he hasn't yet updated his operating software to make his errors of judgment appear to be brilliant avant-gardism and awesomely historic.

Thursday, 24 January 2013

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll
it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are
resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black
should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even
awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him
ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept
from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the
Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all
the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism,
the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole
continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might
slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is
defeating itself.

It is easy, comforting, and convenient to blame American idiocy on the South, it fits perfectly in the dumb culture wars narrative.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

Absent a showing that gender discrimination is causing the selection of
inferior leaders, the sex of politicians and government officials is of
no public import. And feminists’ cherished conceit that women today face
a wall of overt or unconscious bias rests on deliberate blindness to
the facts. No elite organization today fails to incorporate oppressive
gender and race consciousness into its every hiring and promotion
decision. Any woman in the public realm not acutely aware that her
gender is a plus in getting selected for panels and media appearances,
in all likelihood catapulting her ahead of more qualified male
participants, is living in a state of denial.

Well, America is particularly in a state of denial when it comes to gender...

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

The European idea of the nation-state, realized after much
horrific bloodshed in Europe itself, was always a poor fit for
Asia’s diverse mosaic.

Joseph Roth, who grew up in the multinational Hapsburg
empire, was appalled by the imperatives of modern nationalism,
according to which “every person must belong to a definite
nationality or race” in order to be treated as an individual
citizen. Roth, a Jew, suspected that members of minority groups,
like himself, would be relegated to third-class citizenship, and
vicious prejudice against them would be made respectable in the
new nation-states built on the ruins of multinational empires.

The ethnic cleansers of 20th century Europe proved him
right. It required a monstrous crime and a repentant political
imagination to institute peace between warring European nations
and soften attitudes toward minorities.

The battle against bigotry is far from over; Europe’s long
and violent past today looms over its inevitably multicultural
future.

Ah I have always found fascinating the idea that some things are inevitable especially when it is based on the assumption that ethnicity is destiny and identity!

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

The problem with modern voters is not that they are selfish, but that they are often ignorant and irrational.
That problem cannot be solved by restricting corporate and union-funded
political speech. Obviously, corporate and union-funded speech
sometimes seeks to exploit political ignorance. But the same is true of
speech funded by the media, political parties, activist groups, and
others. In a political environment where the electorate is often
ignorant, whoever is allowed to engage in electoral speech has a strong incentive to take advantage of that ignorance.

I agree with Somin even though I am trouble by the elitism (but right) of our shared viewpoint. However, my discomfort is soothed by the realization that America and Americans don't want an educated citizenry because of the belief, that politics is about identity and that illusory thing called culture. In other words, people should always vote who they are and never what they know.

Friday, 16 November 2012

It strikes me that the best way to understand the distinctive
characteristics of US voting patterns is to to treat “Southern White ”
as an ethnicity, like Hispanic. With that classification each of the
major parties becomes an coalition between a solid bloc vote from an
ethnic minority and around half the votes of the “non-Southern white”
ethnic majority, which is more likely to vote on class lines. The
question then is which ethnic/class coalition is bigger. As in other
countries, voting for the more rightwing party is correlated, though not
perfectly with higher incomes and (conditional on income) lower
education, and to shift according to broader ideological movements.

Is it legitimate to treat Southern Whites as a separate ethnic group?
Certainly, plenty of Southerners thought so at the time of the Civil
War. Since then, Southern whites have made strong claims to a separate
cultural heritage, defined in opposition both to blacks (and also
through historic and recent conflicts with Hispanics) and to Northern
Whites.

(...) To the extent that white Southerners vote
on ethnic lines, hostile to key Democratic ideas, it makes little sense
to try for a class-based message that panders to (for example)
Confederate nostalgia. Rather, the best hope is that younger generations
will cease identifying with the South and regard themselves just as
Americans or even (Utopianism alert) just as human beings.

Really does ethnicity make one more likely to be stupid and to vote a certain way? It does in America because ethnicity is treated as a religion. Quiggin's point just illustrates what is wrong with the America's view of ethnicity and race for they are used to legitimate identical illusions and ignorance.

Come on now, whether one is a 'Southern White' or whatever else, in America, the fact remains that it is much easier and even comfortable to justify the unjustifiable by using ethnicity, culture, and identity as excuses for one's biases and irrationality and that is a problem for no matter what their heritage, people chose who/what to be.

Thursday, 08 November 2012

In a campaign devoid of ideas, people fell back on identity. Obama’s
victory was a victory for the Democrats’ strategy of winning on social
values and cohering support among women and minorities, an approach
which was very pronounced at their national convention in September.

Identity politics is very much the present and the future of not only American politics, but of world politics. That said, I think Obama's victory was impressive!

Tuesday, 06 November 2012

Cultural memory and prejudice form strange currents in the Southern
mind. The power of the fear and antipathy of the black man has been
diluted, but it’s still there, and it's easily stoked by unscrupulous
politicians. But it’s easy to just stop there, and you won't have a
clear picture if you do.

If you look closer, there’s something else. The Harley Davidson guys
and their Southern brethren who put rebel flag stickers on their rides
are signaling that they still strongly identify with a war in which
their ancestors found themselves on the wrong side of history and fought
a losing battle. White men in other regions of the country don’t really
get what it feels like to know that your people were defeated in a war
by their own countrymen. There’s a feeling that they lost so much for
this Union to stay together that they’ll be damned if they are going to
admit another defeat by recognizing that America is currently in
decline. That is too much for the heart to bear.

Aah, I have to admit this type of analysis just drives me bonkers for it evokes the despairing consensus in America that identity and culture are solely about collective memory and history. I resent that idea because it takes me back to the Fascist dictum that people think with their blood.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

(...) many people were shocked by the support – from the film industry,
this time – for the fugitive Roman Polanski, who drugged and sodomised a
child. How could Whoopi Goldberg opine that this was not “rape-rape”?

Well, you’re seeing this happening again, with Assange. The message
is clear: if you like a rapist, and particularly if you like the
rapist’s politics, if you see him as “one of us”, then rape is just fine
and dandy.

Monday, 24 September 2012

If the taker economy has less to do with citizens receiving transfer
payments and rather more to do with crony capitalism (or "public-private
partnership", as boosters like to put it) and a rapidly expanding security state
that is more parasitical than protective, then it is not at all clear
which major-party presidential candidate is most on the side of the
makers.

Takers are less and less willing to share and to even acknowledge that inequality as well as unproductiveness is a problem because of identity politics.

Monday, 10 September 2012

Sugary excerpt of the day from Stanley Fish commenting on the dishonest, vile and more importantly willfullystupidly ideological 'documentary' on Obama from DineshD'Souza who must have perfected at Dartmouth what seems to come naturally to him, prostitution :

(...) the meaning of America is continually contested in essays, books,
backyard conversations, talk shows and, most of all, in elections. It
is often said, and it is true, that the opposing parties in an election
have “different visions for America.” There are many ways of describing
the alternative visions offered to us in a year like this; but
describing one of them as un-American and its proponent as a foreign
intruder is not to further discussion but to foreclose it and to
replace the contest of ideas with the rhetoric of demonization.
(Democrats have been as guilty of this as anyone.) Obama may have a
vision for America that you don’t like, but it is a vision for America
put forward by an American. If you don’t like it, vote against him, not
in the name of Americanism but in the name of the ideas and outcomes
you, also an American, prefer.

Via Professor Bainbridge, a pick to illustrate this point and the futily of the attempt to de-americanize Obama:

In short, Obama is as American as apple pie. Unfortunately that fact isn't enough to make him a good president.

I found it thought-provoking, compelling and even morbidly ironic that Obama is considered "foreign," European, and even socialist when it is Mitt Romney who spent critical parts of his youth in France. It tells me that Romney is actually more worldly than Obama and that fact explains, in great part, in my opinion, his obvious discomfort with his political 'family.'

Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of a forcible rape. (...)I used to work for James Robison back in the 1970s,
he leads a large Christian organisation. He, himself, was the result of a
forcible rape…(...) Even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are
inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know,
those people are able to do extraordinary things.

I am having a hard time swallowing (no pun intended) the expression 'forcible rape...' In any case, I think that people who don't believe that marriage is a requirement for women who shouldn't be able to et a divorce when they want one and cannot say no to their husbands because their body is his and giving is is their divine obligation shouldn't comment on rape.

To get back to the core of the issue, I think that 'qualifying' rape is always dumb and abominable for Huckabee could have as well said that great things come from any 'evil." He may have as well said that 'Blacks' and 'Jews' in America should be grateful for slavery and the Shoah because those tragedies enable them to become Americans and to have a shot at the American dream. That would have been as dumb, cruel, inculture and mean as what he said simply to defend his conviction that sex is rarely about violence for after all there is one that takes what is naturally his to take and one that should always feel fulfilled and grateful for the possession/penetration/insertion/abuse.

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

At last Walter Mead says what I have been saying for 4 years, Obama is a WASP:

In his own way, however, President Obama is one of the neo-Waspiest men in the country. He is not a product of Kenyan villages or third world socialism. He was educated at the Hawaiian equivalent of a New England prep school, and spent his formative years in the Ivies. He has much more in common with Harvard-educated technocrats like McGeorge Bundy than with African freedom fighters and third world socialists of the 1970s.

Barack Obama is neither a citizen of the world nor an exotic creature, he is as American as Georges Bush!

Wednesday, 30 May 2012

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jennifer Thorpe's take on the whole Brett Murray's Zuma painting (The Spear of the Nation) with his cock exposed:

Zuma has characterised himself as a man’s man. He celebrates a masculinity that emphasises sexual virility and supports polygamy in the face of an HIV epidemic spread by multiple concurrent partners; a masculinity that emphasises that men take sex when they want it and, despite being accused of rape, never once says that violence against women is wrong; and a masculinity that is heteronormative and homophobic (see comments about pushing down gay men, and appointment of John Qwelane and Mogoeng Mogoeng). His masculinity has been the core of his politics thus far, and perhaps the core appeal to those who vote for him. When it is under threat the very core of what he stands for is under threat. That the painting was defaced by men is interesting and reflects that perhaps these scary sentiments about manhood and its untouchability are shared by many other men, not only Msholozi.

For now we’ll have to see what happens in court for Zuma and for the two men who defaced Murray’s painting. In the meantime state resources will be spent in court cases that focus on what it means to be a man. The politics of the cock are alive and well. And this whole saga had taught us all that they are not up for discussion.

I have to admit that I believe that the painting to be on point for it goes to the core of what/who Zuma is and why his politics are problematic: they justify the worship of the cock, any vile behavior in the name of a non-existent africanness which force morality, ethics to be about who people are (which is determined by their race, gender, class for individuality isn't allowed) rather than about what they do. This explains why Zuma can rape have manly sex with a HIV positive woman and still become president of South Africa.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

I agree strongly with Martha Nussbaum when she says this (hat tip: Norm Geras):

(...) And there’s the argument that the burqa objectifies women. I think the fact that women are often treated as objects for male use and control is a real problem. But let’s also think about porn magazines, the treatment of women in advertising and in the media, where women are treated as consumer objects and are encouraged to package themselves for male use and control in a way that eclipses their individuality. If you go to a high school dance, girls are wearing identical micro-skirts and packaging themselves as objects for a simulated group sex ritual that takes the place of dancing. There are lots of practices in our society that objectify women, unfortunately. To complain about one that happens to be the practice of the minority religion and not to examine yourself and the many ways in which you participate in such practices is terrible, especially when the force of law is brought to bear. In America, fortunately we don’t have bans on the burqa and the headscarf. But the French would ban you from walking down the street in a burqa, while you could wear a micro-skirt and your 4-inch heels and they’d think nothing of that. I think it’s just an ugly inconsistency.

Monday, 26 March 2012

Mark Steyn shows that ignorance isn't bliss and can be as vile as it is dangerous when it is used to comfort one in his delusion that he is both a visionary and a truth-teller (h/t: David Thompson):

Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.

Steyn seems not to know(he probably doesn't for reality is meaningless to him) that France has had a president, Sarkozy, for the last five years, who would agree with him and has been ruled by the right since 2002. Of course, as with all fear-mongers and fanatics, the goal is to keep the fear alive because it enables them to remain irrational and hateful.

Monday, 19 March 2012

(...)there’s a striking difference between Republican tribalism and the kind of identity politics that has long characterized parts of the left. Left identity politics typically involves focusing one aspect of your identity (gender, sexuality, race, religion, class) and organizing around issue that affect the relevant group. We spent a lot of time in the 70s arguing over whether gender trumped class and so on, and getting nowhere, with the result that the left side of politics, to the extent that it can be viewed in these terms, is, as Haidt puts it, a coalition of tribes.

But that’s not true of the right – it’s core tribal appeal is to white, anti-intellectual, non-feminist, non-poor, Christian, heterosexuals who identify themselves, and others who share all these characteristics as “real Americans’. The problem they face is that each of these taken individually is a majority characteristic, the majority of people deviate from the model in one way or another. So, the way to defeat Repub tribalism is to peel off everyone who is on the wrong side of one or another of their culture wars, and reduce them to a minority.

Quiggin is almost right for the wrong reasons. American politics suffers from the focus placed on identity instead of actions. To use Quiggin 's terms, I don't think that political tribalism is worse than identity politics, I just think it is a different strain of the same bacteria that is ruining the political discourse in a country that desperately needs to talk about its present and its future. The issue is that it s obsessed with its past and its essence when what matters is its actions and the welfare of its citizen not the salvation of their soul .